The tech ethics era

It's easier than ever to make the case

As I sit here on the Amtrak — headed from my hometown of DC to Charlottesville to plan the second edition of my Darden elective, “Technology and Ethics” — I have been thinking about the timeliness of the course and what lessons we should convey this year. I’m beginning to think my cofaculty, Bobby Parmar, and I can structure the course perfectly to capture a new zeitgeist in the tech industry and broader society — that tech ethics should be considered alongside product development rather than in reaction to negative consequences after products launch. Put more plainly: in a world where the ethical pitfalls of certain technologies are more evident, it is easier to make the case that being an ethical product manager is part of what it means to be a good product manager.

Last year, when Bobby and I taught the course for the first time, I went in with the notion that the average technologist, although perhaps well-intentioned, was simply looking to make money and build cool gadgets, damn the social consequences. If these consequences arose, firms would hire PR firms and lobbyists to muddle the facts on the ground and obscure their wrongdoing. Ethical shortcomings were nothing more than business risks to be mitigated if anyone noticed.

Facebook post-2016 was the primary example of this paradigm — Mark Zuckerberg went as far as to say, “Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.” Although Facebook’s role was not as instrumental in 2016 as the chattering class would have people believe, to categorically deny responsibility was, to put it lightly, extremely problematic. The Facebook Papers in 2021 also demonstrated that Facebook has continued to dedicate itself to the “cover your ass” approach to ethical leadership.

If Bobby and I were successful in our course, I believed, we would develop students into being the “anti-Zucks,” who considered consequences and pitfalls before they even happened, as part of the product development process. Although the course and this sort of framing resonated with the majority of students, some students wondered why tech ethics issues mattered at a scale smaller than Facebook or Google — or at a level of seniority below the C-suite. Although I believe our case for tech ethics was compelling — obviously unbiased here — we encountered some skepticism around the idea that the decisions made by a product manager fresh out of business school could negatively impact democracy or society at large.

However, entering the course’s second year, I think generative AI makes the tech ethics case for us — not in the sense that it will write our course, but because the advent of large language models presents potential consequences to every one of us that are clear and so imminently urgent. No longer is tech ethics a question for our favorite rib-loving CEO (watch this horrifying video if you don’t get the reference) — it is something that each one of us will contend with in our daily lives as we work, raise families, and make business decisions.

As a result, the ethical conversation around generative AI began in tandem with generative AI’s public release, not in a delayed reaction to it. That conversation includes the Biden Administration, tech CEOs, and intellectual leaders all at least theoretically committed to creating a world where generative AI lives in harmony with the human experience rather than simply a new space for businesses to sell more widgets.

Now, inevitably, the interests of some of these groups will conflict. Whatever solutions we come up with, be they regulatory or managerial, will have holes that need patching. We also have government dysfunction to contend with, especially in the United States. All of these potential shortcomings could demotivate citizens and students wanting to take a more active role in defining the future.

But, as a teacher trying to encourage students to think ethically about technology, the fact that the conversation is so necessary and available helps me make the case that being an ethical technologist matters now, perhaps more than ever. It’s that notion that makes me even more excited to teach “Technology and Ethics” this coming January.